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How to Leverage Blog Comments to Increase Search Rank

Posted By Guest Blogger 12th of February 2013 Search Engine Optimization 0 Comments

This guest post is by Jonathan Solis of NutraSol Natural Center.

When the topic of getting blog comments for SEO comes up, your first thought would probably be to get links to your site by commenting on other blogs.

Well, I usually don’t waste my time with that technique, because most comment links are no-follow anyway.

And I want to bring focus to the comments on my own blog.

Having user-generated content on your site has always been an easy way to gain search engine traffic from long-tail keyword queries.  Comments are a good source of user-generated content containing those keyword phrases.

For the last two years, I’ve been conducting SEO experiments for all types of websites, ranging from my blogs to local business directories, and I have found that user-generated content from the comments section in my health blogs has increased my traffic tremendously.

The site that’s producing the best results for me right now is the Spanish health blog, Informe Natural. I apologize for using a site in a foreign language as an example, but this is the site I reached my conclusions from, and the idea will apply no matter what language you’re blogging in.

How it works

It all started when I began marketing Alpiste Seeds for sale online and featured an article about where to buy them on the Spanish health and nutrition blog.  As people found the page, they began to ask questions in the comments section.

Without realizing it, they were adding to my on-page search engine optimization efforts.

They would ask questions with keyword phrases like, “where can I buy the alpiste seeds in Georgia?” and I would reply with another comment answering the question in a complete sentence that contained the keyword phrase.

For example, I would write “you can order the alpiste seeds by the phone and we would be happy to ship it to you in Georgia”.  I would continue this technique with all the comments and the results were very rewarding.

I ended up getting a high ranking for the Spanish keyword phrase of where to buy alpiste seeds and also the long tail keywords derived from the conversations in the comments section of my blogs.

This technique made that page the second-most popular page on the entire site after my home page.

SEO Blog Comments

How can you do it? Let’s see.

5 Ways to increase search engine rankings with blog comments

1. Provide a call to action

Some people will not comment unless you entice them to.  A good technique is to write a call to action at the end of your article that tells readers to feel free to leave any questions or feedback in the comments section of your post.

2. Reply to all the comments on time

If you give a prompt response and reply to the comments, other users will see that you are involved in the conversation and they will be more likely to ask questions too.

3. Know your target keywords before writing your comment

Make sure you know what your target keyword is before you respond with your comment.  This may seem obvious but it can easily be overlooked.  Do keyword research to find the words that are used more often by searchers.

4. Use complete sentences in your comments

As I stated earlier, answering in complete sentences gives you a reason to use your keyword phrases more often naturally, which helps you avoid making it look like a spammy attempt to increase keyword density.

5. Reply to comments with another question

When you reply to the comments, try to reply with questions so that you will get another response and, therefore, more user-generated content.

Are you using comments for SEO?

Leveraging blog comments is an effective way to get more traffic from search engines.  They are a great source of long tail keywords which account for about 85% of search engine traffic. And best of all, they are acquired from the users directly.

Do you use your blog comments to boost the search rank of your posts? Let me know in the comments.

Jonathan Solis is the owner of NutraSol Natural Center and Director of marketing for Expert Building Services, inc.  He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and he also has a blog where he often writes about professional business strategiesProfessional Tactics.

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Comments
  1. That’s a great idea – I have never thought about the SEO aspect of blog comments. Thanks for this, I will be mindful of this now when answering questions.

  2. well i have disabled comments on my blogs because i think 90% people do comments just to get backlinks.

    • It is a sad thing that so many people want to spam your articles with pointless keyword stuffing. I find myself always deleting these, and end up with little or no value left.

      Have you by chance found readers of your blog leaving valuable remarks? Or is even the other 10% low value?

    • Well, backlinks from comments are usually no-follow and it’s pretty obvious when people are writing comments just for the link. If they comment in reference to your post and include a keyword, why not approve it? It gives you more value than it does to them.

  3. “most comment links are no-follow anyway”

    I would not dismiss no-follow links or their usefulness that easily. While they may not carry the same weight as a “follow” link, SE bots do spider no-follow links and any popular website will automatically get a decent a mount of “naturally acquired” no-follow links for every “naturally acquired” do-follow link it gets.

    Several social media platforms no-follow links, so when a site becomes popular and people start talking an tweeting about it, it will get lots of no-follow links. One could even argue that a big surge in do-follow links that is not accompanied by a similar surge in no-follow links will be suspicious as it could be an indicator of a big link buying campaign.

    • You’re absolutely right. Having a natural link profile is vital and blog commenting is a great way to smooth out the balance – avoiding the spammed blogs of course. I firmly believe moving forward Google will judge a site by how natural the links are. There are plenty of tools out that provide link opportunities and Google will look to weed out those playing the system.

  4. Hiii bro, You are right, All 5 points you mention here is very helpful for every bloggers…

  5. Sir, I want to now that Google also consider comment keywords for search results?

  6. very nice strategy to increase PR rank these tips are very useful for my blog thanks for sharing..

    • Rahul, I didn’t say that comments on your blog will increase your PageRank. They just increase the chances of your site showing up in the SERPs more often, especially from long-tail keyword queries.

  7. Very interesting strategy. It seems like a good idea in theory, but what would prevent an admin from creating a dozen accounts and posting comments on his own web site? This strategy seems like it could easily be twisted by the dark side. (Insert Darth Vader breathing in the background)

    • I totally agree Joel, it could be twisted and broken down to the dark side. In fact, I could head over to fiverr, and just pay $5 bucks to have comments put on my site. I just think over all, it just doesn’t add value with inflated numbers. But, on the other hand, if your creating valuable add on points and people start to chip in other than your 12 comments :-), then maybe your on to something.

    • I think it wouldn’t make sense to create accounts to comment on your own website. Keyword stuffing is keyword stuffing no matter where they are on a page. It’s a strategy that works best organically, meaning that people have to genuinely have a conversation on your site.

  8. When you state

    “As I stated earlier, answering in complete sentences gives you a reason to use your keyword phrases more often naturally, which helps you avoid making it look like a spammy attempt to increase keyword density.”

    I totally feel this is done quite often to receive key word density. When I first started I use to put “Awesome Article” or “Keep Up The Great Work”. I never ever really added value to the world just below the great article that was just written. On a side note though, I do wanna tell you this is a great and highly valuable article.

  9. I honestly never thought of leveraging comments for SEO purposes. Have you made any observations concerning Joel’s point about the strategy getting twisted for the Dark Side?

  10. Thanks for a great post. I encourage comments and answer comments but I never thought of the potential SEO benefits of encouraging the comments/questions and responding with a good answer but still considering SEO.

  11. Replying to comments on time works great. Usually when the post is published and when few comments come in, replying to those few comments right away works great. And with Commentluv Premium, it sends automatic email to the commenters when I reply to their comments. And I usually get most of them to come back and reply again.

    In addition this will also encourage other readers to join the conversation as the post will already have quite a few comments.

  12. I like the fact that you say answer with another question. This is sales basics but how often do we forget to follow advise we receive?

  13. Excellent post Jonathan thanks for sharing your experience.

    Don’t you think comment posting is a good way to drum up some referral traffic though?

    If good comments bring new seo traffic to the page wouldn’t some of that traffic pass through to the person making the comment?

    • Darnell, comment posting is definitely a good way to get some referral traffic. In fact, comments shouldn’t be used for the sole purpose of SEO. It would be ideal to have a genuine conversation on your blog.

      • I agree with Jonathan. Nowadays people comment all over the place just to get referral traffic. In fact, that’s the ONLY reason some people write comments.

        Since I’ve enabled dofollow, spammers have been spammin mah blog with relevant but lacking-in-meaning comments. for example, on my blog post about getting 3000 visitors from a tweet, a spam comment says:

        “Thanks for sharing great article about getting 3000 visitors from twitter. This is very useful information for online marketing managers. Keep it up such a nice posting like this.”

        You know it’s a spam comment because of the spammy site of the comment author. :P Nasty.

  14. Great tipps! Of course it is basic knowledge and everbody could figure it out on her/his own. As Ocha just said, sometimes we need just somebody to tell us again. So I say thank you for this article :)

  15. Best way is just to create value for the community and engage them. It’s good to keep SEO strategy in head but algorithms change over time…

  16. Interesting! I never considered SEO from comments on my own blog. I always assumed it was ignored. Every day is a school day!

  17. Hey,
    Excellent post. I think that Blog comments are one of the fine way to get back links for your website because you can communicate with the owner of the blog and you can also learn new things from other blogs. This is true that all the links from blog commenting are no follow , Do not comment to get a back links. Comment on other blogs to pass some information or get some information !
    Blog commenting is a way to communicate and learn new things.
    Thank you
    Saif

  18. I never thought about comments affecting SEO – thanks for sharing Jonathan. Do you have a preference for which commenting system to use? I like the social aspect of Facebook style commenting, but livefyre is a bit cleaner.

  19. I do respond to all comments, but I could be a bit more SEO oriented in my replies .. thanks for the reminder.

    Monica.

  20. Steven says: 02/12/2013 at 11:44 am

    I must say I am disappointed in this guest blog. 5 links to your own websites and very little content that means anything, coupled with rather mundane comments to try to gain a backlink or two. Ps. I removed my Url from this post signature. I would expect better from such a well respected blog.

  21. great tips for blogger to know more about increasing their traffic and seo to get better ranking

  22. Don’t discount no follow links from blog commenting. For two reasons:

    1) Google expects a natural link profile. If all your links are follow links, the Big G will sense something is amiss and their algorithm might do something nasty to your site.

    2) To a human there is no such thing as a no-follow link. Blog commenting can draw readers to your webpage. Especially if you leave relevant and insightful comments.

    I believe, though I have no evidence, that Google lies about how they treat no follows. I suspect they are more important than people realize.

  23. great tips and very useful.. iam wait for the next post

  24. Well I have never been into research before dropping a comment into any blog. For me commenting on any blog doesn’t mean I want a backlink or SEO I just want to get exposure in terms of relationship with other fellow blogger’s and as well as with the owner of the blog.

    SEO in comments doesn’t sound reliever to me as I have never heard this before. And I think I’ll never going to adopt this strategy as my old strategy on commenting really works.

  25. Very interesting.

    Do you use WP native comments, or some other comment plugin like Jetpack, Disqus, or Livefyre?

    Did you test these to see if any of them helped with SEO?

  26. These are great tips, I make sure I always reply to my comments but I haven’t thought of working my keywords in.

  27. It’s very true that blog commenting is one of the good approach for get good quality traffic from your niche, also the tips specified by your are good for doing blog commenting

  28. Short but full of information. Kudos to the writer for giving us additional tips on getting more traffic. Website traffic is important in making money online.

  29. Adding to the conversation in a thoughtful way has helped me to build relationships, and spread the word about my business in a more human way. The keywords are good to consider, but I would only use them in comments if they truly pertain to my thought.

    I’ve had some pretty good luck developing strong working relationships just by reaching out and adding my own 2 cents to a blog.

  30. I’ve never thought of using the comments section to do that – thanks for the tips. I doubt though that many bloggers ever go back to read the reply comments left by the blog owner to their comment…….unless they have asked a direct question to the blog owner.

  31. Ha! Great ideas Jonathan. I always tried to comment to get backlinks, but asking for user-generated, keyword-dense comments is a very cool thought.

    I’m going to try to implement these 5 tips in my next post!

  32. Thanks so much! I was just wondering if I should respond to all comments? I do, but it can be time consuming. So I set aside 30 minutes 2x a day to respond. It definitely is worth it and had created some great discussions.

    Glad to know that this practice is benefiting my blog!

    Kimberly

  33. You revealed one of my strategy of increasing the SERP rankings for long tail keywords Jonathan, Really. This is what I’ve been doing from long time and it works.

  34. Hehe it made me laugh when I read the comment of Rahul as he said that these tips for PR but there is no relation with PR in this post. When These type of guys do comments, its ok to delete them immediately. SEO for comments really works well because I have realized it on my blog where I post reviews about amazon affiliate program products.

  35. Thank you, this is a real eye-opener. I have disabled all comments on my blog and I’m going to reverse that right away. It’s a lot of work to go through comments and make sure they aren’t spam, but it seems it’s worth it.

  36. Hey Jonathan,
    Awesome post with great information. I really enjoyed the whole post while reading and i think this post will surely gonna help all the newbies. I really like the point of answering with another question. Thanks for sharing this post.

  37. I’ve never even considered any SEO benefit to the comments on my blog posts. I’ve always replied to all the comments just to engage readers and build relationships so they visit frequently. I guess I’ll have to think about the phrasing of my replies a little more now that I know it can benefit with the big G.

  38. I also think that Blog Commenting is the best way for high raking of own site. But Generally I found that reader commenting just useless link without knowing the content perfectly .

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